What words come to mind to describe Charles de Foucauld, canonised in 2022 by Pope Francis in Rome? Self-indulgent? Egotistical? Recklessly impulsive? A spendthrift? A rake? A cad? Godless? Yes, all of these.
To take one example. Born a viscount in 1858 in Strasbourg, Charles Eugene, Vicomte de Foucauld de Pontbriand, a soldier at the age of 22, had a lover, Marie Cardinal. So obsessed was he with her (or with his possession of her, perhaps), he ignored the orders of his military superiors to break up with her, and shipped her to Algeria, to where he was stationed, and set her up in a handy hotel.
For this, he was stood down by the French army. But when his regiment was scheduled to go into battle against Muslim forces in Tunisia, Foucauld so wanted the glory of battle that he immediately abandoned Marie and sent her packing (with significant financial recompense) so that he could be reinstated.
BARREN HEART
Young Charles de Foucauld’s heart was as barren as the desert. He became bored with army life, left it, and became an explorer in Morocco, impiously disguised as a Jew since any French Christian travelling alone would be killed there.
He lived his life any way he wanted. He rejected the faith of his childhood, and his life reflected the consequent despair which the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins so brilliantly described as ‘Carrion Comfort’. Yes, Foucauld could make himself comfortable in every way known to humanity – and yet, strangely, nothing at all satisfied him.
So, what does God give the man who has everything? First, the devout example of a young cousin, Marie Moitessier, who had helped care for him in childhood when his parents died.
He later wrote, ‘Since she possesses such an intelligent soul, the religion in which she so firmly believes cannot be the madness I think it . . . Since this religion is not madness, perhaps it is where the truth lies’.
LOVE OF GOD
Second, the experience of travelling as a Jew, in what started as a caper, led to encounters with authentic Jews of honest example – and he found what it meant to be a Jew and to persevere in the love of God as ‘a stranger in a strange land’ (Exodus 2:22).
Third, a spiritual adviser to whom Marie directed him when all life seemed pointless. Father Henri Huvelin, seeing Charles had used up reason, simply instructed him, ‘Make your confession’. Charles did – he confessed everything, and as he did, he realised with tears that his own sinfulness was what had caused his sense of pointlessness.
Huvelin gently commanded, ‘Receive communion’.
AUTHENTIC VALUE
As Charles approached the altar and Eucharist, feelings of joy, of relief, of authentic value overcame him; what had seemed comfort to him in the past he now recognised as pain, and what had seemed repellent, namely Christian selflessness, seemed like coming home.
But what then became his earthly home? Tamanrasset, in the Sahara Desert, living among the Muslims he had once been so eager to fight. Their surrender to Allah was profoundly familiar to Charles, and this soldier, who had mostly fought himself, became to them a most loving friend.
He wrote, ‘I am here, not to convert, but to try to understand’ and ‘to look upon every human being as a beloved brother’.
When he was martyred by anti-French pillagers in 1916, it was his Muslim brothers who buried him. They made sure to surround his body with fragments of wood, like a coffin, in the Christian manner, out of reverence for his own extraordinary surrender in faith, stark as the Sahara, which they recognised as so consonant with their own.
Peter Fleming is a writer and teacher. He doesn’t own a mobile phone and thinks ‘facebook’ is something you should do after taking one off the shelf to read. Peter’s feature article ‘The lonely disciple’s guide to the Holy Land’ in the autumn 2023 edition of Australian Catholics won best feature at the 2024 Australasian Catholic Press Association awards.
ST CHARLES DE FOUCAULD, (Brother Charles of Jesus)
15 September 1858–1 December 1916
Feast day: 1 December